Welcome back to my episode-by-episode recap of and reaction to Quantum Leap. The spoilers ahead are only through this episode. I provide a short summary at the top, a long and much more thorough recap below that, and a reaction section at the bottom.
My previous episode recaps can be found HERE.
THE QUICK AND CLEAN SUMMARY:
In a very bizarre out-of-human host, Sam leaps into Bobo, an astro-chimp whom he must get into the space program, with the help of Dr. Ashton (Caroline Goodall), who manages the Astro-chimp program. If not, Bobo will die in a meaningless helmet test run by Dr. Winger (Gary Swanson), whose method is based on an incorrect hypothesis.Note: This is the only episode where Sam does not leap into a human being.
THE EXTRA DUSTY RECAP:
via https://quantumleap.fandom.com/wiki/The_Wrong_Stuff
January 24, 1961 – Sam leaps into a chimp named Bobo who is being trained for the space mission. He initially doesn’t realize that he isn’t human and so talks to the doctor, Dr. Leslie Ashton (Caroline Goodall), like he would anyone else. When she takes off his space suit and he finds himself in a diaper, he catches sight of himself in the mirror and panics. Al is little help when he arrives and just laughs at Sam’s predicament in between staring at Leslie. He tells Sam that he has to qualify for the space mission or else he is going to disappear. Sam panics and writes out that his name is Sam to try to communicate with the doctors but they believe someone is joking. Leslie meets a new doctor, Dr. Frank Winger (Gary Swanson), and agrees to go out with him after the space launch.
Unfortunately, Sam is not good at being a chimp and worse at being an astronaut. He resists having his diaper removed and getting in a cage and spits out his food once he hears there are caterpillars in it. He has never seen any of the training equipment before and so has difficulty making the times that the well-trained chimps are able to make. He fails out of the program. A fellow chimp, Cory, has a crush on Bobo and fails because he distracted her. They are both set to move on to different research projects.
The information is all classified and so it takes awhile to get the results, but Al eventually discovers that Bobo’s autopsy reveals he died from massive head trauma and Cory’s revealed the same. Two antagonistic workers take Cory to Dr. Winger’s instead of the chimp he asked for because Cory spits on one of them when he torments her. Leslie comes back and immediately notices that Cory is gone. Through elaborate hand gestures, Sam is able to make her understand that the workers took Cory to Dr. Winger’s lab where he does experiments with head trauma when he tests helmets for human astronauts.
Dr. Winger promises to return Cory and use a different chimp but insists his research is valid and saves human lives. Leslie disagrees that the results are applicable because chimps have stronger heads than humans so while the tests could show that a helmet would definitely kill a human, they cannot show if it will let the human live. Winger asks for another chimp and the workers decide to bring them Sam. Sam gets out of his cage and shocks everyone by using martial arts to defend himself but they are armed and he is not and eventually they shoot him with a tranquilizer.
Now, with Sam strapped into his seat and seconds away from having 5,000 lbs. applied to his head, Al desperately tries to wake Sam up. At the last second, Sam unbuckles the restraints and tumbles out of the chair. He grabs a tranquilizer gun and frees Cory and takes her on the run. With Al’s help, they make it out across a lake by walking across a pipe. Sam is having difficulty getting Cory beyond the barbed wire standing between them and freedom when Winger spots them and tries chase after them. He goes too fast, though, and loses his balance.
Sam can’t just let him drown so (despite the fact that chimps can’t swim because they have too little body fat) he jumps in and pulls the doctor to safety. Leslie and the workers arrive then and Winger is grateful for his life. He decides to end his experimentations on chimps but still ends up developing a helmet that saves lives and is still in use in 1999. Cory gets ahold of a tranquilizer gun and shoots the worker that had been harassing her earlier. Leslie opens up her own vet practice and starts a sanctuary for ex-research and abandoned chimps and Bobo and Cory have a baby.
REACTION:
Sigh.
I thought about ending the review right there but no, let’s get into it. I could not get on board with the Sam-into-a-chimp leap. It never stopped being extraordinarily dumb for me. If I were not dedicated to delivering on my promise of an episode-by-episode review of this series, I would take a long break from the series. I don’t mind the occasional bad episode, but I don’t like feeling as though the writers are insulting me with the plot. Sam as an Astro-chimp felt insulting. There simply had to be a better way to tell an animal rights episode than this.
I love chimps, by the way. I absolutely abhor animal abuse. I think chimps in human clothes are among the greatest sources of joy one can find in life. I found myself at times in this episode letting the plot make me angry on their behalf. HOWEVER… the entire premise of this series is that Sam trades places with another person’s consciousness. There is a science element at work within the show’s own lore, involving brain waves… human brain waves. Here though I am expected to believe that Sam’s consciousness can occupy the body of a chimp AND that moving the chimp into Sam’s body, in the future, did not constitute incredible abuse to it. (Think about what displacing an animal from its body might mean to that animal’s psyche.) It’s just too much. It shouldn’t have been possible for the two of them to switch at all, and even if it was, doing so was its own form of abuse.
Setting all of that aside, a lot of the controversy around this episode is broader than its internal storytelling inconsistency. Should humans use animals for research? The episode kind of walks a line on that. Rather than arguing against the research outright, or for it, the show seems to make the argument that animal research should be done with great caution and with respect for the potential suffering of the animals involved. That POV was probably good enough to get the show screamed at from both sides of that argument.
Did Scott Bakula pull off being a chimp? I mean… he stooped a lot and wore a diaper, so I guess so? I’m not sure I was prepared for the scene wherein the humans wanted to change Sam/Bobo’s astro-chimp diaper. The vibe was a little creepy.
Episode highlight? That’s easy. We don’t know that Sam is a chimp right away. Things are weird, with the outfit he’s wearing, and the way people are acting around him . But when he’s called “Bobo” and sees himself in the mirror… Lol. Oh boy.
Episode lowlight? There are a lot of things competing here. DISHONORABLE MENTION: “Bobo” inexplicably swimming to save Winger, when the plot needed that to happen, was just bad. It’s one thing to say that Sam can use a woman’s body to fight well. It’s another thing to say that Sam can ask a chimp’s body to do something of which it is not capable. That was almost the worst moment of the episode, except that a worse happened right after.
The lowlight winner involved Cory – the chimp not inhabited by a super intelligent human – picking up a tranquilizer gun and accurately firing it at her human tormenter.
We’re on a bit of a losing streak with recent episodes. Let’s hope we turn things around next time.